Read I'll Take Care of You for Free Online

Hartford.
    â€œWhat happened?” she asked.
    But Hartford didn’t say much. Sandy wasn’t sure that Bill McLaughlin was dead, but she suspected as much because the detective was being so cagey. She immediately called her father, a college buddy of Bill’s, who split his time between Newport and Colorado Springs.
    â€œI think Bill McLaughlin was murdered last night,” she said. “I’m going down there and I’ll call you back when I know more.”
    As soon as she arrived at Balboa Coves and saw the yellow police tape around the house, her suspicions were confirmed. Hartford met her out front, lifting the tape so she could get under it.
    â€œWhoever did this had intimate knowledge of his schedule,” Sandy said.
    Hartford seemed irritated that Jenny had dropped off Kevin and left him there all day, because he couldn’t be left alone while the detectives were trying to work.
    After talking briefly with the police, Sandy took Kevin to the house of a family friend who had done business with Bill and was a surfing buddy of Kevin’s.
    â€œThere’s only one person who stood to gain from this,” the friend said. “Nanette.”

CHAPTER 4
    After interviewing Jenny McLaughlin, Detectives Voth and Van Horn headed back to Balboa Coves to continue their search for evidence at the house.
    Voth looked for the spare keys in the dock box on the rear patio, but the box was empty. He hadn’t expected the shiny keys left by the killer to be from there anyway, because they showed no signs of rust or salt corrosion.
    In an interview that afternoon at the station, Nanette told detectives that she’d met Bill in early 1991 while in-line skating on the boardwalk, where they were introduced by some mutual friends. Only she couldn’t remember their names.
    As they reviewed her activities the night of the murder once more, she mentioned that “we” left the soccer game around 8:00 P.M. However, the detectives apparently didn’t catch her slip of the tongue, perhaps because she didn’t mention with whom she had left.
    Pressed for more details about her role in Bill’s finances, she said that since they’d been together, Bill had given her increasing control over his money, including making her a trustee of one of his accounts.
    Jacob Horowitz, she said, was one of Bill’s former scientist employees who had helped Bill develop his blood-plasma separator. After an internal dispute with Horowitz, Bill and his partners bought out Horowitz, then sold the company. Bill had been receiving royalties from that sale, but several “nuisance” suits by Horowitz had blocked the flow of money, she said. Just recently, however, Bill finally heard he’d won the legal battle.
    His Swiss bank account was the only one she didn’t know much about, but she thought it had been established because of concerns about the recent IRS audit. Elaborating on most of his five life insurance policies, she said one was for the trust, one was for the family, one was for the business, and one named her as the beneficiary. But she claimed not to know the value of the payouts, which detectives later learned came to a total of $9 million.
    They also learned that Bill had taken Kevin out of his will, apparently because Kevin’s government-funded medical costs would no longer be covered if he came into an influx of money. With this in mind, Bill had set up a special-needs trust to take care of Kevin’s medical costs and monthly bills. This would also continue his eligibility for public-assistance programs, such as Dial-a-ride and speech therapy programs, which were important because Kevin had already capped out his insurance after the accident. The trust was designed to kick in if and when Bill died.
    Nanette told detectives that she’d been concerned about Bill’s recent dealings in the gun market, and she gave them the name of his gun dealer.
    Asked about